Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

Was this book perfect? No, but I loved every second I got to spend in Lakshmi's company. I was a big fan of Top Chef several years ago, though admittedly we dropped the show for probably logistical reasons I can't remember. Padma writes the way she talks, and I could hear her voice clearly throughout. She tells stories the way you would talk to a friend - it's not always linear, and sometimes you digress and have to come back to your main point after you got distracted for ten minutes, but you're still glad to be in that friend's company and to hear what's going on in their life.

It seems from some reviews that a big draw of this was to get the dirt on Lakshmi and Salman Rushdie's divorce, to which - look, I like celebrity gossip as well as the next person, but that's not the kind of gossip I prefer. I don't find glee in other peoples' pain, and the way she talked about the relationship and divorce - oof. RAW. I was ready to make a judgment about her having an affair with a married man (as Rushdie was not yet divorced from his third wife when he and Padma got together), but the way she writes, I decided right then and there, in one of the early chapters, this was worthy of five stars. I wrote in one of my status updates that she doesn't seem to care whether or not one agrees with her choices, and I stand by that. There's a lot here, and she doesn't hide the hard things. And there are a LOT of hard things - the crippling endometriosis that went undiagnosed for so long, having a foot in two countries and never feeling quite “home,” the divorce and attempted reconciliation, the fear of infertility followed by an unexpected “geriatric” miracle pregnancy, the legal situation regarding her daughter's birth father and custody, the rapid decline in her lover's health as he learned he had brain cancer... it's a lot. She writes about it all beautifully.